Gmail is increasing storage allocations for Google Apps accounts and speeding up the storage increases for standard Gmail accounts. I'm excited to get more space — I'm currently taking up 52 percent of my 2.7 gigabytes — but why now? With competitors offering free unlimited storage, Google is falling behind in webmail features. In August it started offering paid upgrades to Gmail. But why pay for space if you can get unlimited from Yahoo, gratis? Our guess is that the pay-to-play storage service has fallen flat, now that customers are used to getting the world for free. And that speaks to another problem for Google: Why did it want to charge in the first place? Some people whisper that Gmail may not be generating as much advertising revenue as people hoped.

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